Author: Jonathan Toomim (Toomim Bros) 2015-09-29 13:30:41
Published on: 2015-09-29T13:30:41+00:00
The email thread discusses the security criteria and comparison between soft forks and hard forks from an SPV wallet's perspective. Soft forks can trick an SPV client into accepting a transaction, but it will eventually be orphaned. However, SPV clients are systematically susceptible to double-spends that attempt to spend funds in a way that upgraded nodes will reject. On the other hand, with a hard fork, SPV clients will ignore the shorter chain unless Sybil attacked. Transactions on the long chain will often not be present on the short chain due to its shortness, and confirmations will be slow. Hard forks allow new and old versions to operate in parallel, while soft forks make old versions insecure for fully-verifying nodes. Therefore, soft forks mean frequent predictable and manipulable orphan blocks that SPV clients will always follow, with transactions that get confirmed once and then perma-orphaned. Hard forks mean that SPV clients will almost always work flawlessly and give very strange and noticeably wrong results occasionally.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T23:11:42.798998+00:00